


Snapshots

by mirawonderfulstar



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Character Study, Historical, M/M, Photographs, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-11
Updated: 2018-11-11
Packaged: 2019-08-22 00:26:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16587188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mirawonderfulstar/pseuds/mirawonderfulstar
Summary: Five photographs on the wall of Aziraphale’s shop. An expansion of a headcanon I posted on tumblr.





	Snapshots

A.Z. Fell & Co. Antiquarian and Unusual Books is home to one angel, 147,623 books, and just under 400 years’ worth of accumulated relics. The angel Aziraphale is a compulsive documenter and he thinks of the bookshop not so much a place to store his numerous possessions as a place to store _himself_ , all the bits and baubles that make up a very long life. Even an angelic memory can only hold so much after a certain point. The bookshop is Aziraphale’s record, his history.

Well. His and Crowley’s. The “& Co.” on his sign is perfunctorily there so that he can pretend that he’s handed the building down to his son, if anybody ever comments on his very great longevity. Not that anybody ever does. The people who walk by outside often seem to glance over the dingy storefront and continue on their way down the street. Aziraphale prefers it that way, prefers the humans leave his shop alone with its collections and curiosities, some personal, some so deeply interwoven with Aziraphale’s counterpart that they couldn’t be untangled with… well, take your pick of tool, really. It was not foresight, the name Aziraphale chose for his shop, or at least not foresight in the way he’d believed when he’d moved into the building in 1607.

One collection that resides in A.Z. Fell & Co’s lives on the walls of the narrow little staircase up to the landing with the unused bathroom and then up to the first floor with the bedroom that gets rather more use these days than it used to. In dozens of frames, wood, ceramic, metal, are Aziraphale and Crowley’s pictures. They are mismatched, cluttered, absolutely covering the worn dark wood of the wall underneath, and Aziraphale loves them.

The oldest photograph in the collection isn’t even a photograph. Aziraphale had been fascinated with the idea of capturing likenesses from the very beginning, and was one of the first people (certainly the first angel) to sit for a daguerreotype in the 1840s. The picture is faded, a bit awkward, Aziraphale standing stiffly in clothes he hadn’t liked then and doesn’t like now, but Crowley adores it and so it stays on the wall. Aziraphale has often wondered if he says it’s a nice picture just to mock him. Crowley has often wondered if he would be in this picture as well if he’d been awake that year.

The oldest picture of the pair together is from 1901 and was taken six weeks after Crowley woke up from his hundred year sleep. It is unusual in having been moved around this wall a number of times—most of the pictures were placed in frames, hung somewhere, and then never moved again as more pictures filled up space around them. This picture has been taken down periodically and given a more prominent position, so that it remains near the forefront of the collection. Such a thing is understandable, because it really is a very good picture.

Aziraphale had been delighted to learn his enemy and long-time friend had risen at last, and cut short a holiday in France to return to England and see him. Crowley had been bemused, then a bit sheepish, and, much later, very remorseful indeed to learn that the angel had missed him. They had a long lunch together and a longer walk around the city, Crowley reacquainting himself with London and with Aziraphale, who had an endless stream of things to tell him.

At one point they passed a windowfront full of frames, and Crowley stopped in his tracks to stare. Aziraphale had explained to him the advances that had been made in what was now called photography since the proposed experiments featuring silver nitrate shortly before Crowley went to sleep, and then, his eyes widening and an excited smile spreading across his face, he had pointed to the sign on the door advertising that walk-ins were welcome, and hastened Crowley into the shop.

The angel had babbled through the whole set-up of the process, explaining minutiae that even the photographer seemed to find hard to follow. Crowley did his best to listen, but as often happened when Aziraphale got himself going on a tangent the words themselves faded out of his perception, leaving only the tone of his voice as they moved to stand in front of the camera.

It was only just before the photographer took the picture that Aziraphale fell silent, and it surprised Crowley so much that he turned to the angel just as the flash went off. The finished product, which Aziraphale picked up several days later and was delighted to discover hadn’t blurred despite his worst fears at the time, made him smile fondly then and still does so today. The photo is of Aziraphale, side-eyeing Crowley with an exasperated but fond expression, and Crowley, in profile, about to say something, beaming at him. Right now it is on the very edge of the wall at slightly lower than eye-level, where it can be seen perfectly from the table in the back room.

Both Crowley and Aziraphale love this picture, but Aziraphale’s favorite in the collection is one of Crowley alone, one Aziraphale took himself in 1946. They’re on a shore somewhere, on an assignment from Heaven or Hell, neither of them can remember anymore. Technically one of them is not supposed to be there, but in the years following the second world war neither of them could bear to be alone even if neither of them could bear to put into words why. In the photo, Crowley stands with his face to the horizon, watching the sun rise as the wind blows his dark hair into his face. The spray from the sea glints gold against the sky.

Whenever this particular picture is brought up Crowley insists it was taken in Scotland and Aziraphale claims it was somewhere along the eastern coast of North America. This conversation inevitably dissolves into an argument about the relative merit of this particular picture and their respective skills with a camera. Crowley claims Aziraphale only loves this particular picture because he’s a sentimentalist who likes to think Crowley contemplating nature is something like an artistic subject. Aziraphale points out that the taking of photographs and the existence of this collection in the staircase is inherently sentimental, and that Crowley is not qualified to determine whether he counts as art or not. Often there are kisses exchanged at the end.

Crowley’s favorite picture in this collection _was_ taken in North America, in New York in 1954. Neither of them took this picture, or rather, these pictures, for they are four black and white images in a strip that came out of a photo booth at the Coney Island boardwalk. Rather than being in a frame, these ones are laminated, and hung up with a thumbtack in a sliver of space between a large ornate wooden frame containing a painting of Aziraphale done in the 1600s and a metal-framed photo from 1975 taken surreptitiously at the Dowling residence and featuring Crowley wearing a long-suffering expression. These small novelty pictures are afforded such a high place in Crowley’s esteem due mostly to the memories attached to them.

The trip had been a spur-of-the-moment thing, decided upon because Crowley had been getting tetchy and melancholic, and Aziraphale had wanted to head off another hundred year nap if at all possible. They’d taken a ship across the Atlantic because neither of them entirely trusted the idea of flying under someone else’s power, and spent ten days in New York City, going to the theater and to movies, to museums and to restaurants, to the large park in the city and the amusement park on the shore. Crowley had pushed Aziraphale into the booth after a fair bit of protesting, and laughed and laughed afterwards at the evolution of his facial expressions caught on camera as Crowley had moved gradually closer.  

Decades later, Crowley couldn’t help but think that the people in these photos were incredibly dense not to have said something to each other, done something about the nebulous “us” that had formed. There, in that enclosed space, with his face so close to Azriraphale’s and their hands tangled together on Crowley’s knee. That was where they should have acknowledged what they both knew, that they both felt. They hadn’t been apart for longer than a week or so in nearly ten years at that point and they’d gone on holiday together specifically because Aziraphale had been concerned he’d have to go without Crowley’s company again, and yet neither of them had been brave enough to cross that distance. It was so obvious now, looking at the way Crowley’s head had come to rest on Aziraphale’s shoulder and Aziraphale had looked first surprised and then so very pleased.

Dense they might be, but they’d figured it out in the end. The picture by the window on the landing was proof of that. It isn’t a particularly good picture, having been taken by a slightly drunk Crowley by holding one of Aziraphale’s cameras out in front of them and hoping for the best, but it is infinitely precious to the pair nonetheless. They’re sitting on the sofa in Aziraphale’s back room, full of bread and wine and the high of the world not ending, after all. The camera had been on the side table, restored along with the rest of the shop by the mercy of Adam Young, and Crowley had picked it up and grinned at Aziraphale.

“What do you think?” he’d asked. “One for the wall? To celebrate it all still being there?”

“We may as well.” Aziraphale chuckled as Crowley turned the camera on them and scooted close to the angel.

“Smile, then.” Crowley said, and a moment later let out a sound of surprise as Aziraphale pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth. The camera went off just in time, before Crowley set it back down and turned to give Aziraphale his full attention.

There are many, many pictures on the walls of the staircase. Aziraphale took some, and Crowley took others, and the odd one here or there was taken by a stranger who happened to be in the right place to do so, but like all of Aziraphale’s collection they tell a story. It’s an old story, the same story as his books and his box of trinkets and the bookshop in general. It’s the story of an angel, and a demon, and a history together so vast it can’t be fully catalogued, although not, if the existence of such a place and such a collection means anything, for lack of trying.

**Author's Note:**

> my friend Hallie (regencysnuffboxes on tumblr) is an archivist and has informed me that daguerreotypes have to be kept in a freezer. does Aziraphale know this? probably. did i? absolutely not. either the one he has hanging in the stairwell is a copy of the original and he has the original in a climate controlled box somewhere in the back next to his hermetically sealed chambers for the scrolls or he just uses magic to keep the original out in the open. 
> 
> also you should not laminate a photograph if you want it to keep but Crowley is a fucking dumbass who doesn't know that and it is Definitely some "reality alters around perception" magic that's keeping that one safe.


End file.
